Free Republic

Of the identified 429 signs, "a man with jar cup", a symbol unique to the Indus civilisation and other compound letters testified to remnants of the Harappan culture, spanning from 2300 BC to 1700 BC, in South India, Varier, who led the excavation at the caves said. The "man-with-the-jar" symbol, an integral remnant commonly traced in parts where the Indus Valley civilisation existed, has even more similarities than those traced in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, he said. The 'man-with-the-jar' has been a distinct motif of the Indus valley symbols. The Edakkal engraving has retained its unique style as the engraver...

White Europeans could have evolved as recently as 5,500 years ago, according to research which suggests that the early humans who populated Britain and Scandinavia had dark skins for millenniums. It was only when early humans gave up hunter-gathering and switched to farming about 5,500 years ago that white skin began to be favoured, say the researchers. This is because farmed food was deficient in vitamin D, a vital nutrient. Humans can make this in their skin when exposed to sunlight, but dark skin is much less efficient at it. In places such as northern Europe, where sunlight levels are...

The cradle that is India March 07, 2005 Ideas about early Indian history continue to play an important role in political ideology of contemporary India. On the one side are the Left and Dravidian parties, which believe that invading Aryans from the northwest pushed the Dravidians to south India and India's caste divisions are a consequence of that encounter. Even the development of Hinduism is seen through this anthropological lens. This view is essentially that of colonial historians which was developed over a hundred years ago. On the other side are the nationalist parties, which believe that the Aryan languages...

The National Museum in New Delhi is one of the richest storehouses of India's cultural and scientific heritage. Among the prehistoric and protohistoric objects displayed in the very first gallery in the Museum's ground floor, there is a bronze figure from Mohenjo-daro (now in Pakistan). Made in circa 2500 B.C., it is an image of a naked young girl in a dancing pose. Though the figure's height is only 10.8 cms., it tells us a lot about the metal technology that was developed in the Indus Valley Civilization, also called the Harappan Culture. The bronze Dancing Girl from Mohenjo-daro is...

MOSCOW: An ancient Vishnu idol has been found during excavation in an old village in Russia's Volga region, raising questions about the prevalent view on the origin of ancient Russia. The idol found in Staraya (old) Maina village dates back to VII-X century AD. Staraya Maina village in Ulyanovsk region was a highly populated city 1700 years ago, much older than Kiev, so far believed to be the mother of all Russian cities. "We may consider it incredible, but we have ground to assert that Middle-Volga region was the original land of Ancient Rus. This is a hypothesis, but a...

British linguist Max-Muller has invented the Aryan invasion theory that ancient Aryans invade India at about 1500BC, driven out the Dravidians from their land, have imported the Hindu civilization along with Sanskrit language from the steppes of central Asia. The theory was the justification for the British occupation of India, as Winston Churchill remarked. Although there was no archeological evidence to support this theory, it has become the most important doctrine on the ancient Indian history. Although it was opposed by prominent historians like Ramesh Chandra Mazumdar and archeologists like Rakhaldas Banerjee and S.P.Gupta, the pro-British historians of India so...

The earliest settlement in the subcontinent with evidence of agriculture and domestication at Mehrgarh — now in Pakistan — is about 9,000 years old. This coincides with the peak intensification of the monsoon, the study said... The Arabian Sea sediments and other geological studies show that the monsoon began to weaken about 5,000 years ago. The dry spell, lasting several hundred years, might have led people to abandon the Indus cities and move eastward into the Gangetic plain, which has been an area of higher rainfall than the northwestern part of the subcontinent... About 1,700 years ago, the monsoon began...

Aryans In India: Old Debate Triggers New Debate New Delhi, Nov 11 (UNI) An Ancient India historian today said his remarks on academic debate over Aryan invasion were torn out of context by the Director of the New Delhi-based National Council of Educational Research and Training. ''He should read my book,'' Prof D N Jha said, commenting on a suggestion by Prof J S Rajput that his remarks perhaps implied a shift from the theory of Aryans' foreign origin. Prof Rajput's suggestion came in a statement voicing satisfaction over scholars' ''professional'' remarks on the publication of the Council textbook on...

Distributing water DR. T. V. PADMA How did the people of the Indus manage to water their cities? In Indus cities, each house or group of houses had a private well, made with wedge-shaped bricks that slotted together in a cylindrical shape strong enough to withstand the weight of water when the well was full. This is not a simple matter, and required calculation — otherwise a well could collapse once it was full of water. How did the Indus people keep wells and bathing facilities watertight? First, they used bricks that fitted together tightly. Second, they coated the outer...

The discovery of a Neolithic stone celt, a hand-held axe, with the Indus script on it at Sembian-Kandiyur in Tamil Nadu is, according to Iravatham Mahadevan, "a major discovery because for the first time a text in the Indus script has been found in the State on a datable artefact, which is a polished neolithic celt." He added: "This confirms that the Neolithic people of Tamil Nadu shared the same language family of the Harappan group, which can only be Dravidian. The discovery provides the first evidence that the Neolithic people of the Tamil country spoke a Dravidian language." Mr....

Artefacts dating back 4,000 years, unearthed at a burial site in Janabiya, are shedding more light on merchant movements during the Dilmun era. Dilmun seals found at the site are inscribed with an Indus Valley inscription. Indus Valley was an ancient civilisation that thrived in an area between Pakistan and India between 2,800BC and 1,800BC... This is not the first time that Indus Valley inscriptions have been found on Dilmun seals, but it is rare, said archaeology and heritage acting director Khalid Al Sindi.

A civilisation parallel to Harappa? Experts wonder Abhishek Kapoor Vadodara, December 11: Was Gujarat the cradle of an independent civilisation, contemporary of the classical Harappan civilisation around the Indus Valley? This view is gaining academic credence in the community of archaeologists specialising on the subject across the country. The Sorath (present Saurashtra) region civilisation, dating back to 3700 BC at some places, was distinct from the classical Harappan as it developed in the Indus Valley, say researchers in the field. ‘‘It maintained its separate identity in many ways even as a cultural, economic and technological exchange took place between the...

Panaji, Feb 07: Renowned German Indologist and scientist of religion, Egbert Richter Ushanas today claimed that he has unravelled the mystery of Indus Valley scripts by decoding major seals and tablets found during various archaeological excavations. "Already 1,000-odd seals are decoded and of them, 300-odd are printed in monography -- the message of Indus seals and tablets," stated Richter, who has also decoded tablets from Easter Island in Pacific Ocean and disc of Phaistos on Island of Crete in Meditarrenean Sea. "All the seals are based on Vedas -- Rig Veda and Atharva Veda," Richter told a news agency here....

...my friends like Asko Parpola, Professor Mahadevan, and the Russians Professors who have worked on this subject. They have all been working on the assumption that the language of the Indus people was Dravidian, that the people who build the Indus Civilization are Dravidian. But unfortunately I, as well as my friend Prof. B.B. Lal in India, have not been able to agree with this... On the other hand, I have been talking to Prof. Parpola that certainly this is an agglutinative language, there is no doubt. That has been accepted by all of us. Dravidian is an agglutinative language....

Excavations reveal 7,000 year-old Harappan sites Staff Report PESHAWAR: Gandi Umar Khan, around 55 kilometres west of Dera Ismail Khan, is the most important archaeological site of the Indus Valley civilization in the North Western Frontier Province. Gandi Umar Khan is spread over an area of 220 by 200 meters and has a maximum height of 8.5 metres. The site was discovered in 1997 by the University of Peshawar. The Directorate of Archaeology and Museum NWFP conducted an extensive survey of the Gomal Plain in March 2003 and discovered 95 sites out of which exist 53 sites of different periods...

Decoding Indus Valley script TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19, 2002 12:57:48 AM ] ALLAHABAD: Director, Robertson Medical Institute and Ayurveda Ratna Gopalji Agarwal on Tuesday said he had deciphered the much-elusive Indus script which, he claimed, would prove historic in the realm of world history and civilisation. In his latest discovery Mysteries of the world history unfolded, Agarwal told Times News Network that deciphering the Indus script would lead to genetic and radical changes in the current world history books. He said his discovery had brought to surface mysteries shrouding Indus archaeological finds. He said interpretation of all...

WRITING is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science - and of course no books, newspapers or internet.The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform - consisting mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets - which was used more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing systems. Some, such as the one you are...

A University of Washington computer scientist has led a statistical study of the Indus script, comparing the pattern of symbols to various linguistic scripts and nonlinguistic systems, including DNA and a computer programming language. The results, published online April 23 by the journal Science, found the Indus script's pattern is closer to that of spoken words, supporting the hypothesis that it codes for an as-yet-unknown language... In 2004 a provocative paper titled The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis claimed that the short inscriptions have no linguistic content and are merely brief pictograms depicting religious or political symbols. That paper's lead...